Building from SVN

Contents

Obtain the sources

BRL-CAD has recently switched from CVS to the Subversion system. In the new system some of the earlier complexities inherent to CVS are gone, no -dP option is required and developers will not need their passwords or usernames until it is time to commit a change.

Note: If you do not yet have an SVN client installed, go to http://subversion.tigris.org for information on obtaining an appropriate SVN client for your platform. Most modern Linux/BSD/UNIX distributions will also have SVN available in their package repositories.

BRL-CAD also requires the build tool CMake. Again, most Linux/BSD/UNIX distributions will provide a package for CMake - for platforms that do not, CMake is available from http://www.cmake.org

Configure the build system

When building for multiuser file servers it is often useful to make the install_dir reflect the version and/or architecture of the compile. An example would be "-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/brlcad/rel-7.20.2" to install into a /usr/brlcad/rel-7.20.2 directory. (When CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE is set to Release, the installation directory automatically is assigned the appropriate directory and the user doesn't have to do so manually.) This way a single system can have multiple versions of BRL-CAD installed or multiple binary formats for various architectures if installing on a network file system. Symbolic links are then usually added to point to the "current" or "main" version that is preferable to provide so that users only need to add /usr/brlcad/bin to their path. Examples include:

IMPORTANT!!! - Because BRL-CAD has such a long development history, it predates some library naming conventions in modern operating systems. This means an attempt to configure for an install in the "/usr" path on Linux (for example) will stand a good chance of damaging important system libraries - e.g. BRL-CAD libraries put in "/usr/lib" may overwrite system libraries with the same names. Using "/usr/brlcad" or "/opt/brlcad" means all installed files will be safely contained in the brlcad directory.

Compile and test your build

make

At this point, you should have a fully installed and working system. You can test things by doing:

make test
make benchmark

Both the test and benchmark should report successfully if everything is working correctly. Report any failures to the BRL-CAD bug tracker.

Install

make install

If you created a prefix as described above for multiple versions or multiple architectures, you should now create your symbolic links for user convenience and consistency. Example where /usr/brlcad/rel-7.8.0/mips32 was used as the install_dir prefix:

Future versions of BRL-CAD may provide this symbolic link operation for you as a CMake configuration option.

Setup environment (optional)

At this point, everything should be ready for use. If the default prefix of /usr/brlcad was used or if the corresponding symbolic links were created, users should only need to add /usr/brlcad/bin to their PATH in order to find binaries for the package (optionally setting their MANPATH as well):

If users do not want to modify their PATH, they can get by providing the full path to the binaries (e.g. /usr/brlcad/bin/mged). To find BRL-CAD manual pages without setting your MANPATH, use the provided "brlman" binary instead of "man".

Test installation

If everything went well, there should now be more than 400 command-line applications at your disposal for processing images and geometry. A quick test of functionality (and performance) is to run the BRL-CAD benchmark again, which is installed as the benchmark tool: